The criminal past of Johnny Depp's family means he has always been fascinated
by John Dillinger, the man he portrays in Michael Mann's new film Public
Enemies.

The squeals and screams start even before the guest of honour begins to descend the stairs to the club floor where the partygoers have been awaiting his arrival for an hour.

By the time he reaches the bottom step the crowd has swelled to a heaving mass, everyone trying to get near him, touch him, take his picture and plead for autographs.

Johnny Depp, courteous and obliging, poses for photographs and graciously attempts to answer the questions and comments thrown at him before beating a retreat behind a phalanx of security guards who clear the way for him.

So is this is what it’s like to be Johnny Depp: unable to venture out in public without instantly drawing a near-fanatical crowd?

“It was really weird, wasn’t it?” he mused on the following day, recalling the events of the evening before. “Oh man, you don’t ever get used to that kind of thing. You just don’t. That’s why I hardly ever leave my house. I don’t go anywhere. I understand what it’s about and I appreciate it on a very profound level but there’s only so much of that sort of thing a human being can deal with.” We are talking in a suite at Chicago’s Peninsula Hotel the morning after the premiere and party for his latest film Public Enemies. Depp, who has been known to be chronically late for interviews---sometimes hours and even days---was two hours late for our appointment. He arrived, smiling broadly, looking dapper and thirties-style, wearing a grey vintage trilby hat, grey Armani waistcoat and baggy dark blue slacks.

Related Articles

“I can’t think of myself in terms of celebrity,” he said when I mentioned the fan fervour he had ignited among Chicago’s glitterati the night before.

“It’s just too weird. If the choice is between being constantly gawked at and sitting in a chair in a dark room, I prefer the dark room.” He is briefly back in the public eye to promote Public Enemies, director Michael Mann’s story of the audacious 1930s gangster John Dillinger, whose bank-robbing exploits captured the imagination of a Depression era-America and turned him into a folk hero. Depp stars as Dillinger and Christian Bale has the role of Melvin Purvis, the square-jawed FBI agent who tracked him.

“John Dillinger was that era’s rock and roll star,” said Depp. “He was a very charismatic man and he lived the way he wanted to and didn’t compromise. I feel he was a kind of a Robin Hood because he truly cared about people. He knew time was short and I believe he had found himself and was at peace with the fact that it wasn’t going to be a very long ride, but it was going to be a significant ride.”

The economic situation during Dillinger’s crime spree has its echoes in today’s financial meltdown. The cocky Dillinger and his gang, which included Baby Face Nelson, stole the equivalent of what would be three million pounds today during a one-year rampage in which he targeted the Midwestern banks who were foreclosing on properties and whose many failures had robbed people of their life savings. During that time Dillinger also escaped from two jails, eluded police traps and killed at least one police officer. It all came to and end on a sticky July night in 1934 when Dillinger came out of Chicago’s Biograph Theatre, where he had been watching Clark Gable in the film Manhattan Melodrama. Government agents had been tipped off and were waiting for him.

Ever since he was a boy the 46-year-old Depp has been fascinated by the John Dillinger legend, partly because he was born in Owensborough, Kentucky, 160 miles from the Indiana farm where Dillinger lived as a teenager and, more significantly, because Depp’s own grandfather and stepfather had operated on the wrong side of the law.

“It has to do with my family and my upbringing,” he explained. “My grandfather, who I was very close to as a kid, had run moonshine into dry counties like Robert Mitchum in that movie Thunder Road, and my stepfather also had been a bit of a rogue and done burglaries and robberies and had spent some time in Statesville Prison in Illinois where we ended up shooting some of the film. There was some kind of inherent connection I had.” While doing research for the role he discovered a mug shot of his stepfather, Robert Palmer, who died in 2000, in the files at the Statesvillemaximum security prison.

“My stepdad was an inspiration to me,” he said. “I knew about his past and I remember when I was growing up him referring to it as his college years. When I got older and asked him what college he had attended, he said it was Statesville Prison. So for me to be able to get that much closer to him now, especially since he’s passed on, was huge for me. He did what he did and I’m proud of him for doing what he had to do to survive. And he and my grandfather were great inspirations for me for Dillinger.”

Depp speaks quietly and intelligently and exudes an air of calm tranquility, fingering the brim of his hat as he talks. One of the few actors in Hollywood who genuinely did not crave stardom, he has, despite himself, become one of its most bankable stars, thanks in large part to his role as the decidedly eccentric Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogy, which won him awards, an Oscar nomination and catapulted him into the ranks of the leading Hollywood money earners.

He received another Oscar nomination for his singing role in Sweeney Todd and with Public Enemies he turns in another intense performance that could well be remembered at Oscar time.

Like his ancestors, Depp has not always been scrupulously honest. “When I was 12 I wanted to learn how to play the guitar and I found a chord book in a shop and I stuffed it down my trousers,” he recalled. “And that’s how I learned to play the guitar.” It was his guitar playing that earned him his first money in showbusiness as the frontman for a band called The Kids that he formed in Florida, where he was then living with his mother and stepfather. When Florida became too small for their ambitions, the band changed their name to Six Gun Method and moved to Los Angeles where Depp began attending casting auditions. He landed a role as the heroine’s doomed boyfriend in A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, followed by other small parts.

His breakthrough came when he was cast as one of a unit of undercover cops working in schools in the television series 21 Jump Street. He became an overnight sensation and an extremely reluctant teen idol who was so uncomfortable with his unwanted star status that one night he was caught defacing his own image on a billboard.

His first truly original character was Edward Scissorshands in 1990, and throughout the 1990s he built a strong critical and art house following portraying societal outsiders and real-life characters such as the cross-dressing film director Ed Wood, the drug-addled writer Hunter S.

He credits his ongoing eleven-year relationship with the French singer-actress Vanessa Paradis and their two children, Lily-Rose, ten, and seven-year-old Jack with providing him with a domesticity he had never previously known. They spend their time between homes in the south of France, Los Angeles and, when he really wants to get away from it all, on a 45-acre island he owns in the Caribbean and where he moors his 156-foot motor yacht.

“Like everything else in my life, it wasn’t planned, it just kind of happened,” he said with a shrug. “After I had done the first Pirates movie and Secret Window I went on vacation to escape with my kiddies and my girl and someone said that there was an island down the road for sale. I said, 'Oh well, let’s go see it.’ I looked at it, I walked on it and I was done.

It had to be. So I immediately called my business manager and said 'Please,’ and that was it.” He laughed. “It came at the perfect moment for me.

“The island can be perceived as a luxury and it certainly is, but it provides me with simplicity and somewhere I can go where no one is looking at me or pointing a camera or a finger at me. “I can just be: that’s the importance of it. When we’re there we do absolutely nothing. My kiddies don’t have any toys there and they build little houses out of shells.” While the island gives him privacy and relaxation his career provides him with the stimulation and challenges he is continually seeking.

Financially secure and with the knowledge that a fourth episode of Pirates Of the Caribbean is in the works, Depp is now looking to different roles, tending to veer towards projects that offer him a challenge rather than a big salary.

He has just finished filming The Rum Diaries in Puerto Rico and is soon to reteam with director Tim Burton for the seventh time, playing the Mad Hatter in Burton’s Alice In Wonderland. He is also waiting for a script to be completed for a movie about the Lone Ranger and Tonto, in which he wants to play Tonto.

Johnny Depp is the first to admit his career has been random and unplanned. “I’ve never felt particularly ambitious or driven, that’s for sure, although I like to create stuff, whether it’s a little doodle, a drawing , a small painting or a movie or a piece of music, so I suppose I’m driven by that,” he said. “Everything I’ve done has felt very natural and it’s happened because it’s happened. I’ve never done anything because I thought it would move my career forward or anything like that.

“I’m just an actor and if I can leave something behind that my kids will be proud of then that’s what I want. I don’t want my kids to be embarrassed by anything I’ve done.” Then, with a tip of his trilby and a wide grin, he sauntered out into the hotel lobby to brave the waiting crowds.